Destiny

They told me that angels were perfect, but that couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

The barracks weren’t very big, but the distance between the other initiates and I was further than anything I could traverse. They were mostly young people, around my age, eighteen or nineteen, but many had grown up in the understreets as I did, so they’d had to endure hardships the wealthy cloud-citizens couldn’t dream of. We were picked for this program for our skills, not our money. Many of us only applied for a chance at wealth, but I wanted something different. I wanted to be powerful.

The angel division, sometimes called the Valkyries in the underground, was supposedly created by some biotech firm in the foundation years, but the real origins of the force seem to be shrouded in mystery. All I know is that they’re going to mess with our genome, give us implants and nanites and “enhancements” until all that’s left of our humanity is our minds, and then they’re going to mess with those too. They’re going to make us beasts of their burden, and we’re going to have to fight for them, to build for them, to conquer for them.

All of us passed the mental and the physical, but what they don’t tell you when you apply is that they never make you pass an empathy test. Not even once. So it’s no surprise that half of the applicants to this “defense force” are cold-hearted killers with a fancy for the blood of underlings like me.

Many of them have piercings, and some even have tattoos, even though the practice is illegal for most undercity residents. It makes sense; if they were worried about ruining their bodies, they wouldn’t have signed up for a program that vows to do just that. I myself have pieced my ears, but little else. I don’t mind piercings or tattoos, but I’m not excited about the bodily changes by any means.

The only thing I’m looking forward to is finally getting to show Gideon the pain he caused me and to make him regret everything he ever did to me, a thousand times over. I want to show him that he can’t take what isn’t his, and make him feel disgusting like I did, three weeks after the incident, crying in the shower at the shelter.

So as I sit with the other fresh recruits, awaiting our turn to be cut open on the operating table, for our bodies to be mutilated and turned into weapons, I imagine Gideon’s screams as my blades dig into his chest, my voice icy-blue and artificial, my words as cold as a glacier. “You will pay for what you did to me.”

The name on the front pocket of my jacket is wrong; it should be Destiny, not Desiree, but I can’t expect the issuers at CloudCorps to care much about angel recruits like me. They will care, though. They’ll care as their world comes crumbling down, as the sky falls on them. They’ll care as they’re dying in the streets. They’ll speak the name of their killer, and they’ll care. They’ll care for sure.